I read an interesting article in the New Yorker today - noting that online sales are still only about three percent of total holiday sales. (I don’t have a link - yes, I actually read print publications.) But it did note how the web has become an integral part of the shopping experience, during the holidays and the remainder of the year. The article notes that we as consumers are maybe not completing all of our sales ont he web, but the net is becoming a major part of how we buy in different ways:

What [the web] has changed is how we shop, for a simple reason: it has created informed shoppers. In the past, retailers could make profits from what economists call “information asymmetry”: sellers knew much more about prices, quality, and value than consumers did, in large part because good information for consumers was either hard to obtain or just not available at all.

This made me think about how open source applications shifted the game, in large part thanks to the web. With tens of thousands of users of Community Edition, we help to create “informed shoppers” for software. Where before proprietary CRM vendors held their code, feature set, and integration capabilities in a veritable ivory tower before the sale as complete, with Sugar it is all out in the open. And our forums and other community sites allow people to actively voice their opinions on our product, both positive and negative.

We are definitely out front of this trend - creating a more honest experience for both buyers and customers.